Event Date and Time
-
Location
2165E LeFrak Hall (The Charles Wellford Room)

Sarah Tahamont, School of Criminal Justice, University at Albany, SUNY

 

ABSTRACT

The different levels of prison facility are designed to recognize heterogeneity in the inmate population and to appropriately house inmates during their incarceration to minimize risk of misconduct and escape. Prison facility security levels vary in physical characteristics, average levels of violence and other misconduct and staff perceptions of safety. An increase in facility security level could result in a suppression effect on misconduct and/or a peer effect which could positively or negatively affect misconduct.

 

In this paper, I estimate the relationship between facility security level and prison misconduct using an administrative data set from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR). I employ a regression discontinuity (RD) design that exploits cutoffs in the security classification score to characterize the relationship between security classification and prison misconduct.

 

In contrast to prior work that finds suppression effects of maximum security placement on inmate misconduct, I do not find evidence of an effect of facility security classification on the incidence of serious RVRs at the Level III/IV cutoff. The results of the paper do suggest that inmates placed in a Level III facility are 8 percentage points less likely to incur a rules violation report (RVR) than inmates placed in Level II, and that this result is driven almost entirely by a lower likelihood of write ups for Division E or F violations, which are the lowest level of violations eligible for write up as RVRs. I hypothesize that this result may stem from differences in the priorities of custody staff as opposed to lower numbers of these types of violations at Level III prisons.

 

BIO

Sarah Tahamont is a post-doctoral fellow at the School of Criminal Justice at the University at Albany, SUNY working with Shawn Bushway. She earned her Ph.D. in Public Policy from the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on estimating the effects of criminal sanctions on individual outcomes with a particular emphasis on corrections.

Sarah Tahamont